


Fato Profuga

by ecphrasis



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Aeneid - Virgil
Genre: Aeneid Retelling, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Civil War, F/M, Healing, Heavy Angst, Hurt Zuko (Avatar), Katara is Aeneas, Smut, Strangers to Lovers, We all know exactly how this ends, Zuko is Dido
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:22:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26996620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecphrasis/pseuds/ecphrasis
Summary: Zuko, driven out of the Fire Nation, has made a home for himself and his people in the wilderness outside Omashu.A windswept stranger and her band of warriors arrive after a summer hurricane, starving, weary, alien.Like iron filings to a lodestone, Zuko is drawn to Katara, whose suffering mirrors his.The sun and the moon cannot dwell together in the same sky.
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar), Mai/Zuko (mentioned), Ozai & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 54
Kudos: 136





	1. Breviary

**_First light._ **

From the tops of the twelve parapets, the low consonants of the ivory tsungi horns intertwine with the vocalic arias of flutes, and the workmen, already an hour into their labor, wipe their brows and drink cold spring water from the flasks at their hips. The sun brushes rosy fingers over the white quarried stone of the half-finished citadel, and spreads its gleaming rays over the salt-foam sea.

The fishermen return with last night’s catch still wriggling in their nets, and set to work gutting the fish on the wharfs. Octopus-cats scatter amongst them, alternately lounging in the dawn sunlight, and stealing scraps from an inattentive worker. Mothers stir their children from their sleeping mats, and fathers pour libations to their ancestral spirits.

It’s cool, in the golden interior of the palace. The king of the city sweats in his inner garden, running easily through fireless forms, his breaths deep and even, his stomach flaring in harmony with the bright sunbeams filtering through the broad tegmin trees that conceal the natural stone of the palace wall with green foliage and yellow flowers.

He wipes sweat from his lean body, and he ducks his head in the cool pond near the center of his garden, startling the frog-snails into slow flight.

Turtleducks do not dwell so far east, but he has made acquaintances with the lizard-geese. They do not fly at his approach, but instead busy themselves amongst the reeds, a father and his six lizard-goslings, the male a starling blend of purples, reds, and blues, his offspring various oranges and yellows, scales and feathers.

The father lizard-goose hisses at Zuko when he stretches out a hand to see if the runt of the hatchlings might like to curl up in his palm.

The tsungi horn announcing sunrise stirs homesickness in him, a dull ache, like a stone lodged too long in an ostrich-horse’s iron shoe, working its way into the delicate frog of the beast’s foot.

He prostrates himself before the nascent glimmerings of his god-spirit, and the sun’s rays drive out the cool shadows of dawn.

Inside, the palace murmurs like a mountain torrent, flowing with the conversation of courtiers and officials and masons and carpenters. The uncompleted eastern wall allows sunlight to stream over the ancient tapestries Azula bundled up for him, when she helped him flee from the Caldera.

As he does every morning, Zuko allows his gaze to linger over the fine threadwork of his ancestors.

There is the Caldera, a hundred years before Sozin’s time, a glimmering harbor awash in the sun’s light, a great wall-painting made to look a window. In front of it, a dragon hatchling, red and gold, with a half-lidded, crimson eye, coils around the childish body of the future Fire Lord. Light falls on the girl from a hearth, and from the sun streaming in through the eastern window. She is surrounded by the cast-off robes of her father, and she holds with his five-pointed crown in her two hands. The hearthfire reflects off the glinting gold, and gleams again in her eyes, the unmistakable sign of Agni’s favor.

Her bastard sister killed her, age twenty-two, with a bolt of lightning. Either that, or the future Fire Lord chose to save her sister from an assassin, and named her her heir with her dying breath. The reports vary, depending on the faction.

The resultant civil war had almost irreparably rent the country. In the end, the Avatar had to intervene, and had crowned her chosen successor, Sozin’s grandfather.

Zuko wonders if Kyoshi knew what would come of that decision.

He can lose himself in the golden eyes of the young girl in the tapestry, if he is not careful. She looks eerily similar to his own son, before Ozai slaughtered him.

Azula must have been cognizant of the resemblance when she chose to bundle up the tapestry amongst his other possessions and smuggle them out of the palace. He wonders if the similarity is meant as a mercy or as a warning.

Knowing his sister, most likely it is both.

The other tapestry is older still, a landscape scene in muted colors. In the bright sunlight, two dragons circle on wind currents, blue and red, the original masters of fire, just as Zuko had met them. The tapestry abounds with flowers, with trees, with rocks, with windcurrents, with salt water and clear rivers, an explosion of nature, the defining features of all four nations joined in one harmonious image.

However. However. Tropical flowers and arctic mosses do not ever grow together naturally. Trees and bare desert cannot coexist.

He reads the tapestry one way when he is cynical, and another, when the music of childish laughter reaches his ears, and he is fool enough to dream of peace.

He allows himself to brush his hand over the girl’s embroidered cheekbones.

“Urson,” his mind murmurs, treacherously. As he does every morning, he wonders whether naming the child Ozon would have made any difference.

* * *

“My king,” his uncle says, and breaks the spell that holds him.

“Yes?” He asks.

“Once again, King Bumi has asked you to consider whether any nobles from his house catch your eye. This time, he has included men as well as women.”

The echo of his father’s prejudices sounds in his mind, despite his better intentions. He knows that there is nothing reproachable for two men to join together, but he was raised in Azulon’s court, and he had his nascent desires driven out of him by blood and guilt.

“My answer hasn’t changed, Uncle,” he says.

“Zuko,” his uncle says. Zuko knows he’s serious, because his uncle rarely forgoes his title.

It makes the old man proud to view his former ward as a king. Zuko gladly allows him the small comfort, but he will only bend so far.

“Never again, Uncle,” he says. The golden eyes of his ancestor burn into him, so brightly that he has to turn aside from the child who is not, but could just as well be, Urson. 

“The flowers blossom early in spring, although they are secure until the autumn.” Iroh says, as though they haven’t had some version of this argument every week for five years. Then, just to make sure Zuko understands his proverb (it’s been fifteen years, more or less, of constant proverbs; he knows how to parse them), he says. “A wise king has his heirs early. Who will succeed you?”

“You will, old fool,” Zuko says, fondly, and his uncle swats his shoulder.

“Be serious, Zuko.”

“I’ve been married once, Uncle. I had a child. I won’t do it again, and you’re hardly in a position to harass me about it. If you care so much, I’m sure we could find you a match.”

Iroh sighs in a way that Zuko knows means his uncle is disappointed by his stubborn, short-sighted foolishness.

“What shall I tell King Bumi, my king?” 

Zuko shrugs, in the way he knows aggravates his uncle the most, and he dips his head in a bow a few degrees too deep for a king bidding farewell to his favorite kinsman. Iroh sighs again, even more dramatically, and Zuko turns away before his aggravation fades and he does something foolish, like giving into his uncle’s badger-moleing about courtship.

* * *

_**The midday flourish** _

comes just as the migraine begins its daily pulse from behind Zuko’s left eye down to the base of his spine. It’s the reading that does this to him, he knows, but there is so much to read, and he has no time to hear reports read aloud.

His vision is worsening, almost by the day.

When he dreams, he can sometimes see the world as he used to, before his father pressed a burning hand to his face, and all but boiled his left eye out of his socket.

He sets the report aside, and shuts his eyes. The blackness behind his eyelids beckons him. 

The physician said he had about five years of sight left, ten if he did not overstrain himself.

He breathes as his uncle first taught him to, fifteen years ago, when the old scar on his face was a festering burn, white with pus and necrotizing flesh. He draws air deep into his diaphragm, down into his stomach, and he expels it through his mouth. _With the air, the pain, Prince Zuko._ He expels the air, the pain, as he has every day for fifteen years.

The brief moment of relief only makes the migraine worse when it resurges.

Even with his eyes closed, he sees flaring colors, too bright, too reminiscent of his father’s fire, of Azula’s, of- but no. His mind is feral, he has managed to cage the worst of his fears, but they still snarl at him behind the bars of memory. The sounds he hears are phantoms, the noise ringing in his ear is not Urson weeping for his father, it is merely the sound of Ozai’s old injury, still inflicting punishment fifteen years after it was given.

He has a degree, by the sun’s measure, before he will be required to read once again, to open his eyes, to pick up the predictions for soybean, wheat, farro, and emmer, and calculate the profits he can expect to make from his trade with the neighboring kings.

He should eat, he knows. But even the slightest movement sends him into fits of agony, so he chooses to remain motionless, listening for the low tones of the tsungi horn mingling with the guitarron that will signal the end of the noon respite, even though he can feel the motion of the sun; he has no need for music to mark the hours.

The straight-back chair is carved from a twisted cypress tree, a gift from Jeong-Jeong, an ancestral heirloom of his house. It keeps his posture straight and regal, and the knots in the bark dig into his back when he slouches. The table beneath his hands is cherry, one of Iroh’s possessions, that was mildewing in some townhouse in the colonies before he and Zuko retrieved it. When his migraines are truly terrible, the scent of the woodrot sickens him to the point of nausea.

He focuses on his breathing, on the sounds of his growing city, on the way a slight breeze wafts into his office and stirs the parchment and the scrolls, and lifts his damp, sweaty locks from his neck.

Five years. Ten if he is careful. Then he will be blind, in the dark forever, and he will have no hope of seeing the Fire Nation rising up out of the ocean like a silver cloud. He will never see the Caldera gleaming in midsummer, the open arms of her harbor spread to embrace swift ships. The mountains of his mother’s homeland will be lost to him.

The little girl with golden eyes, who looks so like his son, will, just like Urson, exist for him only within his memory.

The hour sounds, and Zuko pries open his eyes. The light strikes his pupils with all the fury of a lightning bolt, and he has to bite his hand to suppress a sob when a minute passes, then two, then three, and still his vision does not return.

But then the edges of his desk define themselves out of the vague brown blur before him, and the characters on his parchment swim into focus. 

He blinks once, twice, and breathes deeply. _Expel your fear with your breath, Prince Zuko_. And then he picks up his parchment, and he begins to read.

He is four minutes behind schedule; an unacceptable delay.

* * *

_**Afternoon** _

The sun curves downwards from his zenith, and the shadows of the city’s walls stretch towards the east. The children are released from their lessons, and clog the streets with chatter and games. The fruit merchants swap out the ice beneath their sweating wares, and the builders rest from raising the high white wall to gossip in the shade, and share sips of potent rice wine from flasks at their hips. 

Zuko spends the hours after lunch in councils, first with the builders, who are behind schedule on the sewers and are demanding more money, even though they are a half talent over budget as it is. He directs them to his uncle; who is not above threatening when Zuko requires it of him.

(Their squabbling voices flicker in and out of his hearing; his body is consumed with the way his head pounds.)

The tsungi horns sound from the parapets, finished and unfinished both, marking the midpoint of the afternoon. The builders are ushered from Zuko’s sight by a harried steward, and he takes a moment to breathe, to expel the agony from his mind, to hone his concentration down to a lazer point.

Then he straightens, and makes his way to the gardens, where the sun burns gaping wounds into his retinae. 

He treats with Bumi’s delegation from Omashu underneath the spreading shade of his tegmin tree. They’ve brought him miniatures, this time, the kind of art that was once highly prized by Fire Nation nobles. He’s not sure what to make of this bargaining tactic, as though they expect his opposition to marriage to evaporate because he’s presented with the portraits of four of Bumi’s great-grandnieces and two of his great-grandnephews.

He demures when asked about his preferences for marriage. He flatters. He hems and haws and suggests he’d appreciate like mineral rights to the hills south of his citadel, and he’d love lumber at a reduced rate, and he’d really, really appreciate it if Bumi didn’t sign an extradition treaty with Gaoling, since Gaoling has chosen to align itself with the Fire Nation.

As for marriage… why, he’s too old to marry a sixteen year old, it simply isn’t done in the Fire Nation. (It is.)

Bumi has older nieces and or nephews? Well, it’s vital that Zuko… that Zuko…

His head, his head, his head, his head. He draws in a breath ( _agony, lightning flickering up his sinuses, his eye is melting in its socket, and he is thirteen years old again, feeling his own face being burned off by his father_ ).

Five years, ten if he is careful, before his sight is burned away forever.

“King Zuko?” External Commissioner Zhu-Shi Long questions, delicately. Zuko knows that the delegation from Omashu is watching, calculating, counting his weaknesses.

“Excuse me,” he says. He shuts his eyes. Breathe in; breathe out the pain, Prince Zuko. “I’m afraid I am distracted; I apologize for my rudeness. I meant no disrespect; I was only overcome by the beauty of-” he gestures vaguely in the direction of the miniatures, grasping for and failing to find the name of even one of King Bumi’s many relations. The Earth Kingdom delegation accepts his lie with close-lipped smiles.

His steward pours him a rather generous helping of cold white wine, which he swallows.

The headache eases, somewhat.

He puts his full attention into his meeting.

* * *

_**Evening** _

It’s Sun Day, so he sups with the Fire Sages, and dedicates the coming week to Agni. When dinner is concluded, the Chief Fire Sage bids him kneel, and he receives a glyph drawn in blood and ash on his forehead, the sign of the sun’s favor. It dries quickly, in the hot summer of what was once the eastern Earth Kingdom.

The character is a rough flame, surrounded by the sun’s halo. As Agni shrinks and settles beneath the western sea, Zuko’s headache eases, and when he rises, he feels almost whole again. 

The serpent Night coils around his city, snuffling out candles, silencing the constant noise of the builders. The children, and then their parents, go to bed. The streets empty, and the shadows become mist.

Zuko spends his evening signing papers, with a half-ear fixed on the Court Poet, who is reciting her latest hymn to Agni.

It’s trite stuff, the kind of poor quality verse he’d expect from a schoolgirl, not an educated aoide, but the woman is the best he has, and it’s not like he can do any better. Still, there’s only so often Agni can be compared to a lover before the image loses its potency. (See Uncle? He can make jokes, even if they are mostly in his head.)

His uncle is absent tonight. It’s Sun Day, which means he’s in the city, drinking in one of the pubs quote unquote in disguise. As though the Dragon of the West isn’t instantly known and knowable to all the two thousand or so inhabitants of his city.

Still, he’s glad his uncle takes time to leave the confines of the palace for the broad, sprawling streets and public gardens and alehouses of the commoners. 

He’s still working when the moon rises. He hears his uncle, stumbling drunk, laughing with Jeong-Jeong down a distant corridor, and the advancing night marks the imprint of its hours in the base of his spine.

There is not enough time in the world for all he has to do.

The words blur before his eyes, and eventually, he knows he will get no more work done. To the sound of the night guard’s horn announcing the midpoint of the second watch, he returns to his chambers.

* * *

_**Night** _

It’s Urson’s birthday in two months, three days, four hours, by Fire Nation measure. In the Earth Kingdom, they start their days at midnight, not at dawn, and begin their years in spring, not in midwinter.

Kuza is lighting the candles in his bedchamber when he enters. She bows to him, a ritually appropriate ninety degrees, and he bends his head in recognition. He wonders how long she has been waiting for him.

“My king,” she says. Her voice is soft. 

She has the bearing of a colonial, not that that word means much anymore. Her eyes are the murky color that lies somewhere between green and gold, and her skin is a touch too light for her to be from any of the noble bloodlines.

“Hello, Kuza,” he says. She startles at her name, as though she does not expect him to know those in his employ, as though he cannot name most of his city on sight. 

He knows what will come next, steels himself for it. Her gaze remains downcast, waiting, waiting for him to say the words that will… that will what? Give her status amongst the servants? Give her leverage to find employment for others in the palace? Give her the right to take whatever reward his uncle promised her for enduring his embrace?

“My king,” she says, again. “You are weary.” Her voice is woman-soft and woman-sweet, her tone almost maternal.

“I am,” he says.

She raises her hand, as though to touch his face, and he intercepts her before she can touch him. Her wrist is warm, pliant in his grasp. Her skin is soft, although her palm is calloused.

“What do you want?” He asks her, and he knows as he says it that he sounds far, far too tired for a man of almost thirty, in the presence of a woman who is not uncomely.

“What you will, my king,” she says.

Years ago, he would have thought her beautiful. It has been years since he has felt another’s lips moving beneath his own, since he has known the supple feeling of another’s flesh yielding to his.

His father terrorized the servants. (Spirits, who didn’t his father terrorize?)

“Go to bed,” he says, tiredly.

“Yes, my king,” she says, in a whisper, and he realizes his mistake when she turns and heads for his.

He briefly considers just doing _something_ (surely if he brings her pleasure, and nothing more, he wouldn’t be taking advantage of his servants) rather than stumbling through an explanation of what he actually meant.

“Um, no,” he says. “Wait.”

She turns to him, wide, brown-green eyes, southern Earth Kingdom fair skin, her hair brown and thick. She’s young, he realizes. 

“My king?” How soft her voice is, how delicate, how low and inviting.

“I didn’t mean… that,” he says. “I meant, I don’t want company. You’re very kind, and beautiful, but I am tired, and-” he doesn’t mean to say it, but it slips out, anyway. “I am not that kind of king. I don’t- It’s not my custom, in my court.”

“You saved my life,” she says. “I was twelve, and starving, and you took me in, although your people scarcely had food for themselves.” There is some emotion behind her words, some meaning he does not have the skill to parse.

He sighs, and he feels suddenly very, very old. “Go to bed,” he says, again, and she bows to him, more deeply than he deserves, and leaves him be.

His son would be twelve in two months time, more or less. An autumn child, like Zuko himself.

He runs his hand over his face, and his hand comes away dirtied with blood and ash, with Agni’s favor.

The night watchman sounds the hour. He has so little time to sleep before he must rise again, and work through his firebending forms, and read all his documents, and meet with his minister of infrastructure, and his lady treasurer, and his minister of education.

The harbor is too shallow to accommodate the deep-keeled boats from Kyoshi Island, and the foolish harbormaster failed to inform Kyoshi’s premier ivory merchant of that fact before she managed to rip a giant hole in her delicate junk. He will have to determine what kind of compensation she is owed.

But that is all for Moon Day. For now, it is still Sun Day, and he can sleep.

A thunderbolt jars him, and it begins to rain, an unseasonable storm.

He dreams of lightning, and a woman lost at sea.


	2. Exiles

The storm is still raging when he awakens. The sun’s bright fingers scarcely scratch the gloom, and cascading sheets of rain wash the dust of commerce from the city. Thunder and lightning swirl in the heavens, and the damp pervades his half-finished palace, seeps into his clothes, chills his stomach. The sea must be vicious, he thinks, and he begs Agni's favor for any of his fishermen who might be caught by the heaving billows and vast thundercracks on the unforgiving deep.

He feels the sun’s motion, although he cannot see it. He works through his fireless and his fiery forms, then drinks from the wellspring in the palace gardens, and sets himself to work.

His morning is eaten up by the agricultural and external trade ministers, who are pushing him to reduce import taxes for grain from Omashu.

“It will benefit the poorest of the city, my king,” the external minister says. “But more importantly, it will prove to King Bumi that our city is a valuable commercial ally to his own. He has been eager to strengthen the ties between our peoples for some time; he will appreciate a gesture of solidarity towards his merchants, especially now that the Fire Lord has placed such steep tariffs on foodstuffs imported to his occupied Earth Kingdom cities from those he does not control.”

“If I subsidize imports, what am I to do about the economic burden I will impose on our own farmers?” Zuko asks. “It’s one thing to relieve the poor and suffering, but bringing in extra grain will drive down the cost of what we grow domestically, and at the quantities you are suggesting, our people will bear the brunt of the burden. Unless you are suggesting that I subsidize both internal and external grain shipments, in which case, I ask you, Minister Aiko, where do you expect me to find the gold necessary for such an expense? And furthermore, what do you want me to do with the excess grain?”

“My king, if I may speak freely?” Zuko shuts his eyes for a full second, breathes, steels himself for the lecture he can see hovering on the edge of Aiko’s lips, like a bubble of spittle scarcely contained by his teeth.

“Of course, Minister Aiko.”

“King Bumi is desperate for an alliance by marriage.”

“I’ve noticed,” Zuko says, dryly.

“You are nearing the end of your youth, my king. The issue of succession is a pressing one.”

“I’m hearing very little about grain taxes, Minister.”

“Our city risks offending King Bumi if we continue to deny him an alliance by marriage, my king. If you are opposed to wedding one of his kinsmen, the least you could do is favor him with trade.”

“Uncle?” Zuko asks. Iroh’s fingers twitch, and he sips his tea with an air of perfect innocence.

“I’ve made my position clear to you, my king.”

“You’re all so desperate to marry me off, I half expect to wake up and find myself an unflowered seventeen year old debutante, and not your monarch,” Zuko says. There’s a polite titter round the table, and he straightens his papers to mark the end of the discussion. “Right, Minister Torlon. Convince me of this scheme.”

“My king, if you turn your attention to the broad economic projections-” 

Zuko obediently turns his attention to the broad economic projections. The numbers float in space, growing and shrinking with his breath. For a king, he is terrible at mathematics, which is something his ministers seem to recognize, because they’ve taken to circling the most important figures with colored ink, to draw his attention to them.

He’s lucky his uncle has his best interests at heart, that he has someone he can trust to double check his always-flawed calculations.

It’s a pity that all of Ozai’s beatings when he was younger failed to inculcate any particular numerical ability in him. 

He feigns understanding of the particulars, and raises enough concerns about the general issue that his interior minister is eventually forced to concede that Zuko will be forced to choose between subsidized grain and the possibility of some citizens going unfed.

“We simply need more colonists, my king,” Minister Amyra says. “The influx of refugees from Gaoling has helped, but we do not have enough people to be a self-sustaining city yet, and all the gold in the world can’t get us workers.”

“I’ll encourage Piando to ferret out strays on the wayside then,” Zuko sighs, and stands. The council, in unison, rises and bows to him from the waist. “Uncle, with me,” he says, and waves the others away.

His uncle is looking old. Zuko knows it’s the dreary weather that gives Iroh his pallor, that his uncle is only in his late sixties, that he has probably another twenty years, but Zuko can see the beginnings of arthritis in the way his uncle clenches and unclenches his quill pen after a long meeting, and the old man doesn’t move as fluidly as he used to.

“My king?” Iroh asks, head bent.

“Uncle,” Zuko says. For a moment, the briefest of seconds, he considers confessing his headaches to his uncle, but the physician was quite clear that there is no known cure, and he will fruitlessly concern Iroh if he tells him.

“Are you well, my king?” He asks.

“Fine,” Zuko says. “Just tired.” Iroh smiles a touch too wide, and Zuko belatedly remembers the girl in his chambers. So. His uncle put her up to it after all. It’s not disappointment that curls through his stomach, but it’s some kindred emotion. His face may be hideously scarred, but it would be flattering to think that someone… but Mai did, and Mai is dead. “What should I do?”

“You’ve faced harder decisions, Zuko,” Iroh says. “The great oak does not concern itself with the fate of a single acorn.”

“The mediocre king needs to know how to concern himself with this situation.”

“Pft,” Iroh says. “If you were a mediocre king I’d rule for you.” Iroh’s golden eyes twinkle, but Zuko reads concern coiled round their pupils. “If you’re serious about not marrying, you should consider aligning as many of your unwed ministers as are willing with nobles from Bumi’s court,” Iroh says. “He’s made himself a target of the Fire Lord’s fury by harboring us on his land, even if he did so unintentionally, and we owe him a strong alliance in payment for everything he’s done.”

“After Mai- after Urson-” His voice doesn’t quaver over their words. The pain of their loss is not the ocean, rising and falling with the tides. It is a constant agony, as certain as the fire in his stomach.

“I know,” Iroh says. “Believe me, Zuko, I know.”

“Am I being selfish?” He asks. 

“The albatross-spider rends her own feathers for her offspring, and nurses them on her blood, but when they are grown, the children devour her.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“You’re tired, Zuko, and it’s starting to show. I think you should delegate more work, and sleep longer hours, and eat larger meals, and learn to suffer joy as well as sorrow. The great mural on the western wall is all but finished, Jeong-Jeong and I saw it last night. I think, once the rain stops, you might like to visit it, and be reminded of why we are here.”

“Thanks, Uncle,” Zuko says.

“Keep an eye on your internal economic minister,” Iroh says. “She’s accrued about three talants worth of revenue from the fisheries and failed to mention it; and I don’t know if that is simply an honest mistake, or an attempt to sway you towards one course of action or another.”

“Alright,” Zuko says.

Iroh embraces him, wraps his arms around him, rests his old white head on Zuko’s shoulder, and squeezes.

“You’re no mediocre king, Zuko,” Iroh says. “What you’ve done in the eight years since we fled the Fire Nation is almost beyond belief. You won a plot of land large enough to support fifty thousand from a king who was prepared to sell you only as much land as the hide of an ostrich horse could cover. Who except for you would have thought to cut the hide into strips thinner than a hair, who would have thought to lay them out in a great semi-circle, encompassing one of the best harbors in the east? And when the land was purchased, you made peace with the surrounding city states, you created harmony between quarrelling exiles. You have established a haven in a world at war, when by all rights everything you suffered should long ago have turned you cruel. If my own son were to do one tenth of what you have done, I would consider myself the most blessed father since that of Avatar Wan.”

His uncle’s praise is given regularly, but the raw wound of a childhood endured under Ozai requires constant soothing, even though he is almost thirty. He kisses his uncle’s forehead, and his uncle bends at the waist, a bow of great respect from an elder to his younger kinsman. 

“I couldn’t’ve done it alone,” Zuko says. “I owe you my life and anything I’ve achieved, Uncle.”

“A sculptor cannot form his masterpiece from mud,” his uncle says, and Zuko bites back a smile at the third proverb in as many minutes.

His head hurts less, when he sits down to review the most recent draft of a fishing treaty with Omashu, and the patter of rain on his rice paper windows provides a soothing complement to his task. The water drowns out the music that marks the hours of the day, drowns out the sound of the city rising up around him like a fire taking to a dry log, drowns out the pounding in his head.

He annotates as he reads, and he finishes ahead of schedule, stretches his stiffening muscles, and resolves to see the progress of the workmen.

The morning’s labor has been interrupted by the bad weather, and he finds them underneath a half-finished portico, dripping wet, breaking up slag stone for strengthening mortar. They kneel to him when he approaches, wetting their thin robes, and he waves them up.

“My king,” Ishiku says, with his head reverentially bent. “Your presence honors us.”

“I spoke with your guildmaster yesterday, Ishiku,” he says. “And we’ve ironed out a timeline for completing the expansion of the palace complex.”

“I’m sorry my hammering will plague my king a while longer,” Ishiku says, formally, and Zuko waves off his protestation with a smile.

“There isn’t a sweeter sound than that of a city rising. Will you show me what you’re doing?”

“Of course, highness. We meant to mortar the eastern gate, and finish this portico today, but the rain’s hindered us from those labors, so we’re preparing this slag stone for whatever eventualities arise.”

“Good,” Zuko says. “And my mosaics, how are they coming?”

“My daughter’s laying one herself today, my king,” a workman says. The pride in his voice is evident. “She won the competition my king hosted for the school children in the lower quarter, beat out a half-hundred others, pleased her mother no end. My wife always wanted-”

“Washa,” Ishiku says, his tone warning. “You bore our king.”

“No, Foreman,” Zuko says. “It’s no boring thing to hear of talent in the young. Tell me, Washa, how old is your girl?”

“Fifteen, my king,” the man says. 

“And still in school?” Zuko asks, pleased. In the Fire Nation, before his exile, children, especially daughters, rarely were privileged enough to be educated beyond thirteen, especially if their parents were poor.

“My king’s educational subsidies made it possible,” Washa says. “And she loves school. Her life’s dream is to be an artist, perhaps even to study under Atisuta herself.” Zuko smiles at the mention of his chief aesthete, a stern, glimmering woman of mixed heritage who came to him when news of his city’s purpose reached her in the Fire Nation colonies.

She walked overland, her feet and hair bare, and brought with her only her tools for sculpting, and a model of a statue of a flame she intended to cast in bronze, and the model alone had been so beautiful that he had instantly appointed her to her position.

“It would please me greatly to your daughter at work on her mosaic,” he says. “We’re laying them in the primary audience hall this moon, are we not?”

“Yes, my king,” Ishiku says.

“Well then, men, I meant to take my lunch with you and ask you about your labors, but you must excuse me. I am always honored to meet those among the young who will ensure the lineage of talent does not perish from this city. Washa, would you escort me?”

The stonemason bows low enough to brush his head against his knees, but Zuko catches a glimpse of something that seems almost like fear hovering on the edge of the man’s wide, open face.

The rain has lessened somewhat since the early morning, and it only drizzles as Zuko and the mason make their way across the courtyard to the audience hall. The courtyard is in disarray, half cobbled, half still hard-packed earth, and there are tropical trees leaning against the wall, waiting to be planted. In time they will grow tall, and provide shade, and will mingle the sound of the wind in their leaves with the sound of the fountains that will be the last of the ornaments to be installed.

It’s a short walk to the audience hall, and once inside, Zuko shakes himself like an ostrich-horse, dislodging the rain that clings to his skin and hair. The sconces and braziers are bright with firelight, and the hall itself, with high, clear windows and white-painted halls, suggests a sunny day despite the tenebrous sky.

The frescos have not yet been started, but the walls have been washed to prepare for the plaster, and the paints have been gathered for the painters, once their designs have been fixed. 

The mosaics are being laid at the far end of the hall, and Zuko crosses over the already-completed images.

The first picture is an old symbol drawn from a scroll long deemed heretical in the Fire Nation; a great circle, split into four parts, in each of which is inscribed the discrete characters for fire, water, earth, and air. He pauses for a moment when he crosses the circle’s boundary, and he prays the same prayer he has prayed every day since his father seized control of the Fire Nation from Azulon, and slaughtered Urson and Mai, and almost killed Zuko and Iroh.

 _Agni_ , he says. _May the Avatar be reborn, and punish those who have destroyed or would destroy the balance in the world._

The next mosaic is a symbolic catalogue of the struggles his people faced and overcame in founding their city. There is the vast, tempestuous sea, the harsh Si Wong Desert, the treacherous gales on the mountaintops, and of course, Ozai’s kinslaying fires. The four elements, raised in warfare against his citizens.

And through them all, a single bright light shines, illuminated by a clever trick with the skylights, so that it gleams at midday, and emphasized by pure gold stones. It trails through the ocean, the desert, the windstorms, and the fire, and it arrives, at last, in the form of an egg, the symbol of Zuko’s great city, the symbol of hope, of rebirth, of order, of boundary, of nurture, of mankind’s better nature.

The mosaics are being laid in the area before his throne, and when the workers turn at his approach, they drop to their knees.

“My king!” Atisuta exclaims. She is wrapped in simple robes, brown and yellow, the traditional colors of Fire Nation peasants too poor to afford the noble red and gold, but she has cut them in a nontraditional manner, so they accentuate the flare of her hip “We’re honored to have your presence. I am overseeing the work of some of the city’s promising young artists.”

“So I heard, Aesthete,” he says. “I could not pass up an opportunity to inspect the skills of my city’s youth. Won’t you introduce me?”

“We have Kuzon from the Fishmongerer’s District,” Atisuta says. The boy moves from his knees to a full kow-tow, pressing his face into the earth.

“My king,” he says. He is perhaps seventeen, his face wide and clear, although he is slight and slender. Zuko supposes the famine his people suffered in their youth is probably responsible.

“Agni smile on you, Kuzon,” he says. “Please, tell me of your mosaic.”

“You honor your servant, my king,” the boy says. “I knew only civil war between Ozai and Azulon when I was young. We were from a country district-”

“Which one?” Zuko interrupts, and the boy bends his head again.

“Motosha in the Black Cliffs, my king.”

“Ah. My mother was from Urna. Please, continue.”

“Azulon’s and Ozai’s forces clashed frequently, because Motosha is necessary for controlling the trade routes from the sea to the capital, and even though we are just as much kin to them as any other firebenders, they did not spare us, but instead each side punished us for aiding the other. My family was loyal to Azulon, and to Iroh after him, and to yourself, my king, when Fire Lord Azulon named you Iroh’s heir, and we suffered for it.”

“You bore your audience, Kuzon,” Atisuta says. The boy flushes, and ducks his head. “My mosaic is of the Black Cliffs, my king,” he says. “They are reddened by blood, but the new sun rises over them, rising from the east, the promise that your rule will someday establish peace in our homeland.”

“A hopeful vision, Kuzon,” he says.

“And here is Musme,” Arisuta says. “I believe she is your daughter, is she not, Stonemason?”

“She is, Aesthete,” Washa says with a broad smile.

“Tell me of your mosaic, Musme,” Zuko says. The girl bends her head, and speaks so softly that Zuko has to strain to hear her.

“My king, I have taken our symbol of an egg and transferred the egg to the world, since peace is the world’s goal, and ours, and from this understanding I have chosen to make the egg hatch, to express my hope that the Avatar will be reborn among us.”

“Let me see your model,” he says. Obediently, she hands him a drawing of an egg, cracked in the shape of continents, from which a slender dragon-snout protrudes.

“Exceptional,” he says. “You have a true eye for the artistry of simple things.”

“Thank you, my king,” she says.

“What think you, Arisuta?” He asks.

“Musme’s artwork is highly promising, especially given she has had little formal training.”

“I believe that must be rectified,” Zuko says. The girl’s eyes glimmer with sudden tears, and he turns to the chief aesthete. “I’d like you to make her an apprentice, provided you are willing.”

“I meant to approach you regarding her, my king,” Arisuta says. “I would be honored.”

“It’s settled then.” The girl seizes his hand and kisses it, and he smiles at her happiness. Her father, however, falls backwards, and Zuko catches a glimpse of something dark and terrible cross his features. “I’ll visit when your work is complete,” he says. “Arisuta, please let me know when you will begin the plastering for the frescoes; I’d like to witness the final step of the ornamentation of my hall.”

“Of course, my king.”

“I’m glad to have met two such promising artists,” he says. “Kuzon, Musme, Agni smile on you.”

“My king,” they bend their heads as one, and Zuko sweeps back through the unfinished hall, Washa at his heels. 

“Washa?” He asks, when they are in the drizzling rain once more. “Is something wrong?”

“My daughter is dear to me, my king,” the man says. “I hold her as dear as most men hold their firstborn son.”

“I’m certain she’s a great credit to your ancestors,” Zuko says, trying not to let confusion color his voice. The man seizes his arm unexpectedly, and Zuko has to fight the urge to summon fire to his hand. The mason and presses his lips to Zuko’s palm, and wets it with his tears, the way a mother would beg for her treasonous son’s life to be spared.

“My king, by Agni and every spirit, I beg you, she is only a girl, despite her years. She did not mean to entice my king-” Understanding dawns, and Zuko feels the slimy tendril of guilt wrap its green appendage round his throat.

“Washa,” he says. “My interest is not directed towards that end. I am not that sort of king. I merely admired your daughter’s artwork, and I desire her talents to be cultivated.”

“The Fire Lord took my sister,” the man says. Zuko’s mouth curls in distaste.

“He was wrong to do so,” he says, shortly. “A king is the father to his people, not a leopard-wolf preying on unweaned koala-sheep. I regret any conduct of mine that may have suggested I shared my father’s proclivities.”

“I did not mean to imply-” Washa starts, and Zuko stills him with a gesture.

“I took no offense, Washa,” he says. “Your love for your daughter is commendable. I would feel similarly, if I stood in your place. Return to work, and do not be afraid.”

The man bends his head, and Zuko watches him through the drizzle, and he sighs.

Beyond the wall, he hears a sudden commotion, a sounding of the horns, and a man’s shout, and then a rising clamor that drowns out the soft drizzle of the waning afternoon rain..

“Fetch the king!” Piando cries, above the hubbub, and Zuko hurries towards the commotion, towards where a great crowd is gathered around a knot of blue-clad, sopping people, squalid, thin, dark-skinned, half-starved aliens. They are hemmed in by spears held in the expert hands of his guards, they have already been induced to throw their weapons on the ground.

“I’m here,” he says, and his people part for him. Silence descends, and he gazes upon the newcomers.

“My king,” Piandao says, and bows. The strangers draw up, like a snake curls round itself, and raise their arms, the way a viper lifts its body in preparation for a blow.

“Fire Nation,” he hears a woman breathe, in a voice close to tears.

“Lower your weapons,” Zuko orders his guards, and obediently, they root the spears on the earth, still at attention, but less immediately threatening. “I am Zuko, King of Ursmai,” he says. “It is not our custom to so mistreat travelers. Who speaks for you?”

A man shoulders his wan through the knot of people, a blue-clad warrior with a wooden leg, and a vicious, poorly healed burn that runs from his cheek down to his chest.

“I am Bato of the Southern Water Tribe,” he says. “And if you intend to kill us-”

“No,” Zuko says. “No. We are not Fire Nation anymore than you are.” He holds out his hands, palms up, to show he means no ill will. “Tell me, what brings you here, to my city, under such duress?”

“We were sailing along the coast,” Bato says. “In convoy, twenty ships full of us, the last souls living from the South, but a storm scattered us. Our leader did her best to hold us together, she calmed the sea with one hand, and attempted to still the waters all around us, but the wind and the waves seemed to be opposed to us, and no matter whether we tried to make for land, or tried to head further out to sea, our efforts failed. I was the captain of a ship that splintered on the shoal southeast of here. We did not know there was a city here, our maps say this land is unoccupied.”

“It was, eight years ago,” Zuko says. “But as you see, you have found a group of fellow exiles. If you will swear peace to me, and to my people, and break bread and taste salt with me before the shrine to Agni, then I will offer you hospitality, on the condition that you surrender your weapons until you are ready to leave.”

“My king-” Piandao protests, but Zuko stills him with a glance.

“Will you do it?” He asks.

“We did not think to find a welcome among men of the Fire Nation,” Bato says, warily. “And it is against our custom to surrender our weapons, even having sworn an oath of hospitality. I cannot speak for any of my people besides those who are here, since I am not our leader.”

“I can offer you warm baths and hot foods and a secure place to lay your heads,” Zuko says. “But if you will not swear peace, I must expel you. I do not think your group will suffer another night in the wilderness easily.”

The old warrior looks around, as though gauging the opinions of his fellows, and he nods his head.

“Aye, I’ll swear it, King,” he says.

So Zuko leads him to the great shrine to Agni, an eternal hearthfire that burns within a house of wood and stone, surrounded by a trench of water, and he and the alien swear interlocking oaths of peace and fidelity and good will and friendship, and then Zuko breaks bread, and hands one half of the sacred loaf to Bato, and then Bato takes a pinch of salt, and places it on Zuko’s tongue, and they kiss ritually, first the left cheek, then the right, and then embrace as guest-friends, bound by the spirits.

With the oath sworn and the weapons taken, Zuko orders food and baths and dry clothes for the strangers, and Piandao leads them off, no longer under guard, but under close watch, and Zuko returns to his afternoon meetings with the question of the strangers at the forefront of his mind. He dispatches his city magistrate to discover all he can about why “the last souls living from the South” are sailing along the eastern edge of the Earth Kingdom, and to see whether others, shipwrecked by the storm, might be prowling loose along his coast.

He dissolves his committee on fiduciary security early, when he is informed that Bato has asked for an audience.

It has stopped raining by midafternoon, and the sun has just begun to appear from behind the dark stormclouds. Zuko holds his audience in the lesser receiving hall, which has no throne or ostentatious artwork, only a high, wide window that bleeds sunlight on a floor made to look like a bed of embers. Zuko sits in the center of the sunlight, bathed in Agni’s favor, and Bato bows to him when he enters.

“King,” he says. He’s shaved and changed into a borrowed set of brown and yellow robes, some Earth Kingdom refugee’s laundered castoffs. They fit him poorly, but he holds himself like a warrior, and Zuko does not miss the tension in his guards’ stances.

“Bato of the Southern Water Tribe,” he says. “Have you been made welcome?”

“Your people have been most generous,” Bato says. “I have not had fruit so fresh in years, nor ever tasted such sweet wine, and the hot water is a marvel I have only heard tell of in legends.”

“It’s a trick of Fire Nation engineering my people absconded with, when we fled the Fire Lord’s fury.”

“I’m glad to see other cities founded by other exiles,” Bato says. “My leader has always held out hope for us, but we have spent years adrift, searching out a homeland that might accept us. She believes we are destined to rebuild the ancient civilization of waterbenders, although she is the last one left among us. She has led us safely through so many trials that you would almost think she is the Avatar.”

“She sounds like a woman many would be proud to follow,” Zuko says. “Although I imagine she must be quite old.”

“No,” Bato says. “She’s perhaps your own age, King, if not younger.”

“Truly?” Zuko asks. Interest and hope stir equally within him. “I was taught that the Southern Water Tribe long ago lost the knowledge of waterbending.” Bato grimaces, and Zuko amends his words. “Or rather, that the Fire Nation took it from you.”

“She is the daughter of our late chieftain, Hakoda,” Bato says. His eyes gleam when he talks of her, glimmer with the light of bright devotion, and Zuko watches the way his face opens when he speaks of his leader. “She was born early, weak, but by her second birthday, she was capable of summoning the sea.”

“Incredible,” Zuko says. _If waterbending can resurface after generations of absence, perhaps then airbending too might not be lost. Perhaps the Avatar still lives, or perhaps may yet be reborn._

“She taught herself,” Bato says. “Using only old scrolls and the memories of the ancient, she mastered the art, and for ten long years we held off the Fire Nation ships that sought to seize our capitol and destroy us. She held the wall alone, she sank a fleet of warships, she stopped the fire where it bloomed, and if it weren’t for a treacherous admiral who swore an oath of peace before the spirits, and then proceeded to sack our city while we feasted, we would still be secure behind our wall.”

“She taught herself?” Zuko asks, eyebrows raised. Bato nods.

“She had a hard time of it at first, but now there is no better fighter in all the world.”

“I would dearly like to meet her,” Zuko says. Bato’s eyes cloud, and the fire flickers fitfully in his dark pupils.

“I pray to Tui and La that she survived the storm,” Bato says. 

“I will ask the Sages to propitiate Agni for her deliverance,” Zuko says. Bato bends his head politely.

“We appreciate your generosity, King. There are not many cities left in this world who are willing to take in bands of outsiders, especially considering how long our people have been at war.”

Zuko watches the way the Water Tribesman watches him, from lidded beneath lidded eyes, his body poised, his muscles tensed.

“Of course,” he says. “Tomorrow, I will summon you before my council on foreign politics, and I will ask you how you managed to escape my father’s ethnocide of your people. We heard tales about it from your allies in Kyoshi, and from a few deserters of the army. We catalogued the destruction of the South along the western wall of the city, as well as with the other crimes against the balance of the world.”

“So it is true then, what they say,” Bato says. His eyes flick over Zuko’s body, and pause, curiously on the scar that consumes half his face. “You are the Fire Lord’s son.”

“I was, once,” Zuko says. “My father respects blood bonds about as much as his admirals honor vows made to the spirits.”

“I will tell you what you wish to know in council tomorrow, King.” Bato says. “We have no secrets left; without our leader, I doubt we have anything at all.”

“Very well then,” Zuko says. Bato bows to him, and Zuko bends his head in recognition. His guards usher Bato out, one on either side, and he sees the man’s hand twitch when the guard on his left allows his scabbard to come within reach. Still, the Water Tribesman does not break his oath, and Zuko is left sitting alone in the watery sunlight.

He soaks it up into himself, and he’s pleasantly surprised to find that no headache is pounding at the bottom of his consciousness. For once, he is completely free of pain.

If he were a good, competent king, he would work through his economic forecasts; he would double check the tax revenue from the cheesemakers; he would inspect the barracks or the homes for orphaned children.

But his uncle’s words roll through his head, and when he stands, he finds that he wants to see the city that he founded.

His guards snap to attention as he passes out into the courtyard. The stonemasons are taking measurements to finish the portico, and they salute him when he passes. He can hear Arisuta lecturing from inside his unfinished audience hall. His feet move silently across the cobbled courtyard, out the gates flung open to the sacred field, and to the city.

Despite the sun, which has now emerged fully from behind the clouds, the city is surprisingly misty, and as he makes his way to the western wall, to see the newly completed mural of the world’s history, he descends deeper and deeper into the fog. 

The merchants have begun to lay their wares out on the street, but the fog lends him anonymity, and he moves amongst his people as though he were merely another citizen, and not their king. The streets are laid in labyrinths, to confuse invaders, but he designed the city; he paced out the boundaries; he knows it as well as he knows his own son’s face. 

He comes to the western wall, and he’s surprised to find a woman weeping over the images.

She’s tall, and robed in a black cloak that hides her face in shadows, and her shoulders shake as she sobs. He scans the images - there are the warships sent out from the Caldera, the ethnocide of the Air Nomads, the death of the last Avatar while still a baby in the cradle, the ravaging of the Earth Kingdom, the seizing of the four great coastal Earth Kingdom cities, the eternal siege of Ba Sing Se, Ozai’s purge in the Caldera and Iroh and Azulon’s other strongholds, and the invasion of the Southern Water Tribe.

The woman’s shoulders shake as she sobs, and Zuko wonders whether she is an Earth Kingdom colonial who lost her family in the civil war between Azulon’s supporters and Ozai’s, or whether she is Fire Nation, weeping for the way the world could have been.

The mist swirls around her as though almost alive, and for a half-second, he wonders whether he is in the presence of a spirit, before she speaks.

“It still hurts,” she says.

“I think maybe it always will,” he says. She doesn’t turn at his voice, doesn’t bend the knee, so she must be new to the city. He tries to place her in his memory, and he cannot.

“You are an exile too?” She asks, voice soft.

“I was, before I came to the city,” he says. “The Fire Lord killed my mother, and my wife, and my son.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. She pauses for a moment, and he finds himself straining to see her face behind her black veil. “He slew my father and my brother, and I miscarried my dead husband’s daughter while escaping.

Her words are an open skylight to the constellations of her agony. He feels his own loss keenly, standing in the swirling mist before the record of his people’s crimes.

“There’s no pain worse than losing a child,” he says. Her shoulders shake with a silent sob, and a sympathetic knot of tears rises in his throat.

“I think losing home is close,” she says. He can see the outlines of her body beneath the black of her traveling cloak. She is painfully, pitifully thin, but her arms are corded with more muscle than he’s ever seen on a woman, and he can see the outline of a knife strapped to her hip. She must be new to the city, to look so storm-tossed and travel-worn.

“No way forward, no way back,” he agrees. He can feel her looking at him, he can feel the weight of her gaze on his scar. His head throbs suddenly, and he has to fight the impulse to clench his eyes shut. The mist swirls like a snake, so thick it threatens to hide her from his sight, she appears to be retreating, either because of his faulty vision, or because the fog is thickening. He wants to see her, to look upon the face of another parent who lost their child, another spouse who lost their partner, another exile who lost their home.

“Yes,” she says. “I’ve been driven by fate all my life, but I’m afraid I’ll never be able to stop running.”

“I was the same,” he says. He steps towards her, and the mist swirls. She turns to him, shrouded in black, the color of luck in the Fire Nation, and the color of new life. “But I chose to stop running.”

“You are the king of the city,” she murmurs, finally catching sight of the crown lodged in his hair.

“I am,” he says. He waits for her to honor him, but she remains upright, her eyes fixed on his. “Are you too proud to bow?” He asks, his voice low.

“You are not my king,” she says. The fog swells around her, and he shuts his eyes against the migraine rising from the patterns he imagines he can see in its depths.

“You’re in my city,” he says. He draws closer still to her, so close that if he were to lift up her chin, he would see her eyes.

“I don’t bow to anyone,” she says, and raises her gaze.

He stumbles backwards in shock at the brilliant, vibrant blue of her eyes, and the mist roils around him, and without meaning to, he calls fire to his palm.

“You’re a waterbender,” he says.

“I am,” she says.

“Are you-” he starts, swallows, and begins again. “Are you her?”

“There is no other,” she says, cooly. “I watched your soldiers seize my people, and I meant to find them and flee, but your murals proved a surer distraction than any of your men.”

“Your people are safe,” he says, and he’s aware of the tension that leeches from her shoulders. She shifts in her stance, draws herself closer to him. Her hair is salt-sodden, he can smell the ocean when she shifts her weight. “I have fed and housed them, for the time being.”

“Why?” Her gaze is cool, her eyes bright and quick and flashing blue. He is thunderstruck by the magnificence of her, the regal way she holds herself, by the mist that twines around her like an octo-pussy cat, climbing up her legs, twining through her hair, as though desperate to draw close to her, to touch her.

Her cheek is scarred by a single diagonal cut, the work of a vicious sword swung to kill.

“The city is a symbol,” he says. “I serve the balance of the world.”

“There are many of us,” she says. “I lost three ships in the storm, but there are seventeen others safe with me, and there are at least a fifty people crammed on each one. Our sails are shredded and our vessels are no longer seaworthy.”

“If you will work, I will offer you lodging and food as long as you require,” he says. “I will assist you in rebuilding your fleet, so long as you aid me in finishing my city.”

“We have not dwelt inside walls in many years,” she says. “Your offer is generous, King. On behalf of my people, I, Katara of the Southern Water Tribe, pledge friendship for friendship, kindness for kindness, good for good, and deed for deed, from this day until my dying day.”

He repeats the old oath, and she clasps his hand. Her grip is firm as a man’s, her skin salt and sun-tanned, dark as an old mariner from Igon-sha. He kisses first her left cheek, then her right, and she mimics the action, pressing her lips against his scarred and unscarred skin.

The dangerous prickle of arousal stirs across his skin, and his treacherous organs pulse to draw her closer, to taste the sea-salt that must be layered on her lips, to tangle his fingers in her wind-tangled hair, to peel off the black robe that hides her from him, and see her body in the sunlight of his city.

“I will bring you to your people, Chieftain Katara,” he says, and she laughs softly, as though she can tell his desire from the low tremor in his voice alone.


	3. A Humid Night; The Stars Begin to Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for a brief though somewhat graphic description of a miscarriage.

_I slough my skin. I hatch. I molt._  
 _Am I the me I was before?_  
 _I’m desperate, as I grow old,_  
 _to slip my bones, remodel, melt_  
 _these sleeves of selves that leave me cold._  
 _Can what I was before transform?_  
 _Or do I, when I break my mold,_  
 _transform to what I was before?_  
From _What He Did in Solitary_ by Amit Majmudar

Zuko paced the boundaries of his city long before the first mud hut was raised. He walked ten miles over brush and wilderness, demarcating the threshold of civilization, appointing the positions of his gates, sketching the outlines of streets and avenues and temple complexes with voice and gesture. 

With his advance the wilderness fell back.

From the first mud huts round the narrow bay flowered into brick houses, then his stone palace, then the white walls of his city, and the wide cobbled streets, and the public gardens, and the freshwater fountains, all exactly as he had first pictured it, when the land was little more than mangrove and marshland and rapacious quicksand, and the mountains in the distance, thick with caves. 

And people came to him, Fire Nation citizens whose homes were lost in the endless conflict between Ozai and Azulon’s factions, colonials who feared displacement, since, with the Fire Nation in turmoil, Earth Kingdom warlords had begun to turn their eyes to the west, and even Earth Kingdom citizens themselves, who wanted an escape from anarchy or totalitarianism or plague or whatever other evils ailed them. And Zuko’s city blossomed with their aid.

He had all the ancestral wealth of his uncle’s vast estates; he had the holdings of the high-ranked Fire Nation officials whom Ozai attempted to purge, and he had the luminaries of the Caldera, the engineers, inventors, and philosophers whom Ozai could not win over to his side through threat or bribe or guilt or goad. 

___________________________

Zuko spends close to an hour contemplating an appropriate outfit for his feast with the Water Tribe aliens. He has his armor, the symbol of his strength, silver chainmail and boiled ostrich-horse leather, practical, functional, well-worn.

He has his white mourning-robes, which, if he wore them, would symbolize his sorrow for the destruction of the South.

And then he has his formal robes, gold and purple and crimson, in a dozen different cuts, each one representative of some aspect of his city. There is the cloth woven within his walls, still not quite to the standard of Gaoling silk, but as good as anyone outside of the occupied territory can get. There is imported cloth-of-gold from Ba Sing Se itself, sold at a steep profit by Omashu merchants, but affordable nonetheless. His city's trade in coal and ore and gems is flourishing. He has robes of rich furs, shoes of leather and cloth and wood, diadems and rings and necklaces and pins.

“My king?” His uncle is dressed in the simple style that is fast becoming the standard court-dress of the city; domestically produced linen, dyed a dark purple almost to black. Functional, fashionable, rich without ostentatiousness.

“Dapper as always, Uncle,” he says, and feels guilty for his planned excesses.

“Still undressed?” His uncle inquires, in the low, even tone that Zuko knows means the old man is thinking something.

“I wasn’t sure-” he starts. The woman’s eyes flash in his memory, he sees her in a swirl of grey mist and black fabric, regal, alien, alluring. “I don’t know what kind of message I want to send.” Iroh chuckles as though Zuko were thirteen, not almost thirty.

“I think there’s a nursery rhyme to help you. How does it go?  
White for mourning,   
Black for hope,   
Gold for glory,   
Red for home.”

“And green for Urson,” Zuko adds, thoughtlessly. The words wash over his ears; freeze themselves, freeze him, and all of a sudden the thin garrote of grief is tightening its wire round his neck, the pain as sharp, as bell-tone clear as though Urson were two days dead, not nine long years. He can hear his son laughing, hear him clapping in time to Zuko’s atrocious sing-song voice, demanding he be given his favorite color.

And Zuko would tease him _orange for Urson yellow for Urson grey for Urson silver for Urson, blue, violet, pink, rose, brown magenta crimson topaz mauve for Urson_ every color under Agni’s eye for Urson, and his little two year old son, his truest love, would demand green with a louder and louder voice while Mai watched with the little quirk in her eyebrow that meant she was laughing.

He sucks in a breath of air, but his nasal cavities seem to have lengthened, because his lungs won’t expand, won’t fill with air; he cannot breathe. He knows that if he gasps he will begin to weep.

“Oh, my son,” Iroh says, so, so softly. His hand cups Zuko’s cheek; the king bites his tongue until he tastes blood to prevent himself from spilling hot tears into his uncle’s palm. “I know, my child. I know.”

__________________________

Zuko dresses himself in supple black leather, durable enough to be decent armor in a field campaign, luxurious enough to befit the king of the world’s only city at peace. He drapes a cape of gold around his shoulders, embroidered with hundreds of moonflowers no larger than his fingernail, and he wears a green fillet round his head spotted with fresh-plucked firelilies. He dons his hunting boots, and the hard soles crack against the flagstones of his palace. He keeps his scabbard empty at his waist, a sign of peace and strength.

“The King of the City!” Jeong-Jeong bellows, and Zuko hears the scrape of benches pushed back from tables as his people and the strangers stand as one. Iroh opens the doors, carved with flowering vines and apotropaic rings of fire, and Zuko strides forwards into his unfinished great hall.

He steps over the mosaics promising harmony. _Let the Avatar be reborn._ He crosses the story of his people’s struggles, their conquest of all four elements. His people bow before him, bow to the waist, dressed in homespun linen dyed dark purple, in cloth of silver imported from Shi-ne-Zha, in the finery that good trade and good wages and good faith permit.

When he catches the eye of Silona, the old woman whom Iroh found starved half to death in the colony of New Sozin, when he hears rambunctious little Hana loudly shushing his younger sister, when he feels the goodwill in Piandao’s eyes as his Captain of the Guard strides alongside him, the suffocating sorrow of Urson and Mai’s loss is lessened.

He passes over the untiled floor, and stands on the egg cracked in the shape of continents, his city’s hope, his city’s symbol, and his hobnailed boots strike the floor and send up sparks. He halts beside the strange woman, who stands beneath a white wall awaiting plaster for the frescoes. 

“My friends,” he says, and his voice rings out clear and true, liquid gold and summer wine, a sun-warmed ocean and a late spring breeze. “We have guests among us, exiled from their homeland, just as we once were. We know the pain of the dispossessed. Help me share the joy of our city with them.”

He lifts his eyes to the woman beside him. She has cast off her black traveling cloak for a robe of deep blue, blue as the ocean’s depths, hemmed in silver. Her hair is held back from her face by a single intricate braid that spirals round her head, and she is wearing hunting boots, just as he is.

“Chieftain Katara,” he says, solicitously, and he bows to her, a slight inclination of his head, nothing more.

“King,” she says, and inclines her head just as he did. Doesn’t she know the rules for etiquette? Doesn’t she know she owes him more than a mere nod?

He snaps his fingers, and a pitcher of clear water and a plate of white salt and a decanter of crimson wine are brought before them. He kneels on his mosaic egg, the tiles vicious on his knees, and he performs ceremonial oblation, pouring red wine over his hands and onto the floor, sprinkling salt over each of his fingers in turn, and then rinsing his hands in the clear water.

The waterbender performs the same actions beside him, rinsing away the evil of the outside world. When they are both finished, he takes her right hand in his right hand, and her left hand in his left hand, and they drip water over the fresh mosaics.

“I pledge peace,” he says, loud enough for his voice to echo back to him.

“I pledge peace,” Katara responds, her words rolling like a thundercrack. He sees their echo in the way her assembled people, blue-clad, faces scrubbed of sea-salt, pitifully thin, looking upon his city with wide, unblinking eyes, relax.

“Then let us feast,” he says, and the hallowed stillness of the room evaporates. A quartet of flautists in the corner strikes up a traditional Fire Nation paen, and after a few measures, a drummer and a tsungi horn player join in. Conversation bubbles up and overflows between the stout oak tables, and Zuko turns to Katara.

“Will you join me on the dais, Chieftain?” He asks, and offers her his arm. She looks at him, looks at his arm, and turns on her heel towards the low table and golden couches that are on a platform above the mixed revelers.

“Of course,” she says.

“I’m offering you hospitality,” he says. He extends his stride slightly, so she is forced to hasten if her pace is to match his. She seems to glide beneath her flowing cobalt robes, and he knows he looks the fool, hurrying to his table as though he is a starved child who cannot wait for his supper. “The least you could do is be deferential.”

“I’m grateful you didn’t slaughter us or pack us off or imprison us,” she says. Her eyes meet his, feral, aquamarine, hard as sea-ice during the long winter. “But I do not owe you my allegiance, King. If you want to demand it, I’ll take my people now and be outside your borders before moonrise.”

He looks at her, thin, travel worn, unquestionably weary, and he looks at the hard-won opulence of his citadel.

“My friendship is not conditional,” he responds, and she offers him a smile with white, gleaming teeth.

He reclines on his golden couch, and she situates herself beside him, her head propped on her palm, her eyes wide and watchful. She doesn’t laugh or make jokes, but when a particularly loud burst of merriment rings out from one of the low trestle tables, her mouth twists into something that looks to be a mix between a smile and a sob.

He knows the feeling.

He pours wine for himself, then for her, a sweet yellow vintage, the first harvest of his fields.

___________________________

“How did you do it?” She asks him, when they’re two cups in, and she’s devoured a full plate of zensai. He can tell she’s holding herself back, he can tell that she’s starving but unwilling to eat more than he does.

“Do what? Found a city?” He asks, prepared to tell her the story of the ostrich-horse hide and Bumi’s gamble.

“Bury a child.”

The silence stretches between them for longer than is polite. He finishes his third cup of wine in one long gulp, and finally the sharp edges of the room begin to blur, and the omnipresent headache begins to fade, and the knot in his throat loosens enough for him to talk.

“There wasn’t anything to bury,” he says, and she startles, as though she had not expected him to answer. “My sister had me kidnapped by one of her chi-blockers; I thought I’d be brought to my father and executed, but instead I was loaded on a fully provisioned ship with my uncle and a handful of his supporters. I guess my sister killed someone in my place and gave my father a corpse too charred to identify. I held funeral games for my son’s spirit, but I couldn’t return him to the earth.”

Her people burn their dead, he knows. They pollute the sacred flames of Agni’s breath with human corpses, a sacrilege great enough that it first inspired his ancestor Sozin to contemplate the path of conquest, or so the story goes. 

She touches his hand, and like iron filings drawn to a lodestone, his eyes find hers. There is such agony swirling in their depths that he may as well be looking into a mirror. His heart stumbles on crippled legs. 

He jerks away from her, but he can feel the prickle of her touch on his hand, and he can feel the weight of her gaze on his skin. The hairs on the back of his neck lift, and he notices, suddenly, that the dark brown of her skin is the color of ship-bark at sunset, the color of cedar left to settle in silt come high tide.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her eyes are two blue pools he could sink into and never escape from. Her skin is dark as seawater at dawn. “What was his name?”

“Urson,” he says, and she murmurs the word, echoing him. “After my mother,” he says.

“I would have named my daughter Kya, after mine,” she says. “The Fire Nation killed her when I was a child.”

“They killed mine too,” he says. His words are wet with unshed tears, and a burst of laughter from his uncle's table brings him back to himself. “Eat,” he says, gruffly. “You look half-starved.”

“Three-quarters, I think,” she says with a laugh, as though privation is no more burdensome to her than the wind is burdensome to a gull. Her lips are rosy and the wine has flushed her cheeks, the way dawn’s long fingers redden the eastern edge of night at the end of the third watch. 

She eats a sea-quail egg in a single bite, and her eyes squinch shut in bliss. She bends the delicate curve of her neck, and she chews slowly, grinding out the full flavor of the dish. He tastes it, simple enough, a food he eats at least twice a week. He’s almost overcome by the intense flavor of the gelatinous egg, the interplay between spice and savor, the light hint of sweet wine in the sea-green yolk.

He refills her wine glass, and she glances at him. Her eyes spark like firelight, and Zuko’s tongue tangles round itself in his desperate effort not to say as much.

“Thank you,” she says, her voice liquid, fluid. He can hear her despite all the hubbub of the hall.

“Of course,” he says, solicitously. “Whatever you need.” Her eyes crinkle in the corners. Her mouth parts, and he sees the pink shadow of her tongue dip behind her white teeth, her cheeks draw upwards in a smile. The wrinkles on her forehead smooth, and she appears to lose a decade, appears to be eighteen, instead of twenty-eight.

“Thank you,” she says again, more softly, and she lays her hand over his.

His skin sparks; he almost sets the violet tablecloth aflame. Her smile lingers in her eyes, he wants to make her mouth split in laughter, to watch worry ebb out of her skin, like mist rising off a lake at dawn. Her palm is cool, calloused, scarred by years of combat. He can sense the latent strength in her, the long, wiry muscles, the hardness honed by hunger and years of war.

He would not want her for an enemy.

“Tell me, Chieftain-”

“Oh please,” she says, a laugh half-buried in her words, the way ocean sand swallows up shells when the tide rolls in. “Katara, King, call me Katara.”

“Zuko,” he says. “Please.”

“Zuko.” She rolls the syllables of his name in her mouth, her tongue tasting the phonemes the way he would taste fine wine. “What should I tell you, Zuko?”

“Tell me how you came to my city,” he says. Her eyes flicker up at him, her lips part, her hair is loosening from the spiral braid around her head.

He can see the outline of her nipples through the thin blue silk of her robe. He can imagine the way her face would flush when he brushes his fingertips over the globes of her breasts, he can imagine his name slipping between her clenched teeth. He’d leave livid bruises on her neck, mark her as his, robe her in purple and gold, colors fit for a queen.

His cock twitches in his supple leather breeches, and he digs his crescent nails into his palms.

“If I start my story now we’ll be here until the morning,” she says. “Look, your people and mine are tangled up and drowsing over the last course of dinner, and the stars are dipping down beneath the ocean. It's late; I’d hate to bore you.”

“Don’t worry about that, Katara,” he says. His stomach throbs when he says her name. “I’m curious.”

“It’s a sad story,” she says. “But that you already know. You know the agony of losing home.”

Her words spool out, splintered shards of agony polished to smoothless by suffering.

The city wall she raised from ice and snow,   
the winters spent concealed in the dark,   
the summers warding off invading foes,   
the allies made and lost,   
retreats across the ice,   
invaders slaughtered,   
gutted,   
left to rot   
on snowbanks. 

The skills she taught herself,   
how to attack, how to protect,   
how to turn saltwater into fresh,   
how to extinguish fires in the melting permafrost.

She learned to love, a boy her brother’s age,   
an outsider who came with aid   
rom the Earth Kingdom,   
before Kyoshi fell.  
He had Air Nomad blood, she said.   
His eyes were grey.

Towards the end, her people truly thought  
that they could win. Sokka had been slaughtered  
and his corpse torn apart, but her people  
did not falter, held the line, held fast,  
and then in midsummer, the Fire Fleet  
sailed away.

A trap, blatant in retrospect.

They swung back around,  
a traitor opened up the city gates,  
and let them in.  
They raised a din that echoed in the night,  
and slew her father in the sacred grove.

She led the flight  
Down to the harbor and the waiting ships.  
She slew a half a hundred of her own  
Raising a wave to drown those following them.  
It was the only way.

(Her eyes are icy when she tells this part, but he sees the way her jaw clenches, the way her nails dig into her palms, the guilt and grief that vie behind her sea-blue eyes.)

Her husband perished holding back the line  
of firebenders.

Her child slithered bloody down her leg,  
vomited in clumps from her womb’s depths,  
the long-hoped for daughter whom she loved.

And in the years since, those who survived have wandered  
the wide world,  
in ships and overland,   
their bodies/minds/limbs/memories of home  
weakening within, all while without  
the world spins and the sun rises and sets,  
While forgetting, she tries not to forget.

It’s dawn when she finishes her tale. Her voice is hoarse from speaking, and her eyes are moist with tears.

Zuko gasps a breath he had not realized he was holding, and his lungs expand and push back his tears. He catches the scent of her, sea-salt and tallow candles and fresh moonlight filtered over flowers, and his stomach trembles when he brushes his fingers over her hand.

“My city can be your home, for a time,” he says. “If you want.”

“I do,” she says.

The hall is all but empty now, he sees. A guard is dozing, propped against a wall, and Jeong-Jeong and Piandao and his uncle are knotted in a corner with the leaders of her kin, discussing shipbuilding or something similar. He rises from his golden couch, and tucks a strand of hair come loose from his crown behind his ear.

“Allow me to escort you to your rooms,” he says, and she glances up at him, her eyes two round blue moons in the dark dawning of her face.

She puts her hand in his, and he closes his fingers around hers.

“You do me honor, King,” she murmurs.

“Zuko,” he says. “Please.”

__________________________

The palace hallways redden with the dawn as he leads her through the glistening white walls, through a green garden, to the empty wing where he has offered shelter to her kin. She marvels as they walk, she pauses for a moment to examine the lizard-goslings slumbering in the pond.

“I want to see more of your city,” she says. Her voice is the low sound of the tide washing foam up over golden shells. Her words touch his ears like starlight strikes his mind.

“I’d like to show you what I’ve built,” he says, and his voice remains even. “When you’ve slept I’ll take you on a tour.”

“I will look forward to it,” she says. 

He brings her to her apotropaic door, warded against evil with a graven ring of fire.

“Goodnight, Katara,” he says. The supple lines of her body draw his eye, and for one heart-clenching moment he imagines pressing her against her door, and layering kisses on her wellspring eyes. 

“Goodnight, Zuko,” she says. He memorizes how she turns from him, how her robes swirl around her too-thin legs, how the braziers highlight her slender form within her silks.

He turns himself from her, his headache pounding in his eyes, his skin flickering with light, and retreats to his own chambers.

The sun is almost up, and he is half-hard. He rests his head against the white walls of his chamber, breathes in, breathes out, breathes air, breathes fire, _breathes_.

She is his guest, his alien, nothing more. 

She is a fellow sufferer, she knows what he has learned these past nine years.

Her nipples growing firm beneath soft silk-

He groans and strokes himself. His hand is calloused in ways different from hers.

He gasps at the sudden rush of blood into his groin, leaves himself dizzy as his arousal overwhelms him like his wine.

Her voice would sound like liquid in his ear. He’d wring his name from her red lips, he’d make her name him, see him, make her see how she’d become him, and he her, he’d claim her like he claimed his city’s land-

He thrusts into his fist.

The way the torchlight sparked across her skin, the way she rested on the golden couch, the way her words rose up in her throat and spilled out-

He spends.

He’s crying. Snot and guilt and semen, Mai and Urson, Katara’s ravaged home, and he, filthying his white stone wall in his new home.

She is his guest. He is her host. She is a foreigner and she does not belong, not in his city, not to him.

He cleans up carefully, takes his hair down from his crown, shucks off his dining dress, and robes himself in fortunate black accented with red. (Black for hope, red for home.)

He blinks back the headache building in his eyes, and he begins his labor for the day.


	4. The Cave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that there's been such a long span of time between updates. I got viciously sick with covid (I'm basically recovered now, but I have to say, I have NEVER felt so awful for so long in my entire life) and I basically didn't do anything except school and sleep for two and a half weeks. 
> 
> The alternative title for this chapter is The Storm Before the Calm Before the Storm.
> 
> Enjoy.

Just like a little boy, at play in the shallow sandbanks of Ember Island, strays into the ocean swells, reveling in the sun’s warmth on his salt-sodden skin, leaving behind the safety of the land, finds suddenly that he can no longer stand, that the sea is surfacing above his head, that he cannot breathe except through water, that his eyes are blackened by the sea-salt and his lungs are screaming, that he is overcome, drowning, so Zuko’s thoughts stray towards Katara.

Just like a hand aflame presses ember-fingers against the soft skin of a son’s flesh, and, sizzling, eats through muscle and blood, devours gristle until it comes to bone, so thoughts of Katara devour him.

________________

Her people eat as much as they are given. They rend flesh from bone, scarf grain, gobble up offerings of fruit, swallow wine like water. They do not demand, they do not even ask for more than is laid before them, but every morsel proffered is swept up into their mouths.

It’s no burden. The fishermen sell their evening catches at high profit, the traders from Omashu speak favorably about his city’s increased trade, the farmers bring kine and swine and sparrowkeets to market in droves.

He watches Katara devour a savory cut of koala-sheep flank, and her eyes catch his.

“We overstay our welcome, perhaps,” she says, tone apologetic, but she does not drop her gaze.

“We have plenty,” he says. “It is good to give in abundance to those who have nothing.”

“I have never had so much meat in my life,” she says. “Growing up, flesh was rare as hawk’s teeth, almost worth its weight in silver. We ate otter-penguin or tiger-seal a few times a year, if we were lucky.”

“When I was a child we ate fried dormice and swallow’s tongues by the ton,” Zuko says. Katara’s eyes flicker over him, and he’s suddenly conscious of the way his black robes hang over his body. He’s aware of the grey filaments that have begun to flower within his long black hair.

“I cut my teeth on hunger,   
my mother’s milk was blood,  
snowmelt was my summerwine  
and sea-ice was my food.” she says, her voice sing-song. She lifts a still-bloody piece of flank-steak to her mouth, chews, and swallows. Her eyes shut in bliss. He can imagine the child Katara, perhaps six, perhaps eight, her stomach smaller than her fist, clenched in want, half-starving in the winter months.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Don’t pity me,” she says, finishing her goblet of wine. “Privation made us strong.”

“Still,” he says, picking at his own dinner. “My people spent long years wandering before we founded the city. I know what it means to go hungry.”

Katara glances at him, her gaze glacier-blue, frigid, and he does not tremble under her inspection.

“You do,” she says, softly, as though she can read the scars of his exiled years beneath his office’s ornate robes and his body’s well-cultivated muscles. “I think perhaps our hungers are not dissimilar.”

Her lips are pink, her skin flushed with the two cups of summerwine she has drunk, her body draped in cloth-of-silver he gifted her from his treasury. The fabric is metallic, it catches and scatters the candlelight, breaks flames to rainbows, sends up sparks when she gestures with her lively hands. 

His treacherous body wants to pull her to his chest, in front of his people and hers, and feed her meat and marrow from his hand, and offer her wine from his tongue.

“Perhaps not,” he says. He watches her fingers, because he cannot watch her eyes. Her hands are bare, and scarred, the tools of a master bender attuned to her element. 

Idly, he wonders which one of them would have the advantage in a fight. Perhaps, grown used to food and peace and plenty, he would beat her. As she is now, however, half-feral, no safer than a platypus-bear dragged in from the wild, he would be loathe to fight her. He knows how desperate hunger makes its victims.

If he were to fatten her, make her soft with city-life, strip away the wild’s terrors from her, clothe her in silks and gems, would she twine her arms around his neck, and spend the winter nights within his bed? (Would she come to him from obligation, determined to repay him for his generosity? Would she yield herself to him out of duty? He could not bear it.)

___________________________

He spends fewer evenings working by candlelight, now that he has to see to the entertainment of his guests. 

He summons entertainers from all the neighborhoods of the city, troupes of singers, dangers, acrobats, magicians, artful benders, children in training to be poets, women skilled in paintings portraits, men who play instruments, and his people, night after night, prove their civilization to the visitors.

He spends more on entertainments in two months than he has in the past two years. He gifts Katara a strand of precious sapphires set in gold. She dredges the harbor to allow the deep-keeled Earth Kingdom junks to dock.

Traders, catching wind of the open treasury of his city, flock to his harbor, hawk cloth and exotic foods and precious gems that other cities, at war with Ozai, have no compulsion to buy.

He has gold enough. He buys all that he’s offered.

Katara’s people teach his how to weave tensile nets from fishgut, and how to harvest and prepare the ordinarily poisonous shoreshrimp from the shallows. 

Shoreshrimp is a delicacy in Omashu, normally imported at great cost from Kyoshi Island. Bumi’s more than willing to sign over iron ore in exchange for exclusive access to his new trade.

Katara offers the service of her chief aoide, and to the sound of a skin-drum and bells wrapped round all four limbs, the old woman sings of creation.

Sun-Father and Moon-Mother/Traced the same path  
Trailing each other/From sea-shore to occident...

The drumbeats swell like pain behind his eyes, but Katara’s sea-salt scent seizes him, and he swallows down his discomfort, and holds back the blindness threatening his mind.

____________________

When, much later than his former custom, he takes himself to bed, head flushed with wine and good cheer, the white fog of memory draws over him like a shroud. Wandering in his dreams, his fever builds and his head throbs and he sees the shadows of Mai and Urson drawing away from his hoarse-throated cries. Lust overtakes him, his cock stiffens, he wakes to find himself overcome. 

It’s like he’s sixteen again, and aroused by the mere glimpse of a woman’s breasts shadowed by blue silk, aroused by the sound of a voice lowered to make a half-obscene joke, aroused by the half-wild way she swallows meat, as though the ash mark of hunger has faded but not yet been washed away from her memory. 

She ducked her head so modestly when her aoide praised her beauty, but when her people sing of her warcraft, she accepts their praise without flinching.

He doesn’t mean to take himself in hand night after night, but if he doesn’t, he wakes to sullied sheets (he’s not a child anymore; he’s too old for this kind of lust), or else his sleep is disturbed by the low fire coiling and flaring in his stomach and his groin.

It’s worse than the embers that ate at his eye, after his father all but burned it off.

He’s realizes he’s going mad when he wakes from a dream that his nose is buried in her cunt and he almost leaps out of bed to make it real Only the endless throbbing behind his eye halts him, the reminder, bone-deep, of who he is, and who he is to her.

Iroh catches him in his inner garden shortly before sunrise, sweating through his fireless forms, trying to ignore the uncomfortable swell of untended desire. Iroh joins him, and together they work through the dances Zuko learned long ago, under the tutelage of Ran and Shaw. The old forms are more pleasant when he has another to work with, when someone else’s steps provide a curb against his own. When they finish, he ducks his head into the scummy pondwater washes sweat from his body with a white rag, while Iroh wordlessly prepares their morning tea.

Zuko hated tea as boy, thirteen and furious, his eyesight all but ruined because he refused, point-blank, in front of Azulon and the entire Royal Court, to fight his sister for his birthright, even though his father commanded him. But Iroh, who had demanded his custody from a livid Azulon, had been patient, had poured him cup after steaming cup of jasmine, ginseng, cha, and matcha, until, somewhere around his seventeenth birthday, Zuko started pouring for him.

After Urson was born, Iroh had always insisted on holding his grandson in his arms when he and Zuko took tea. He cradled the baby to his chest, and Zuko watched the decades slough off the old man’s face when his son struggled in his swaddlings.

Zuko knows better than to hurry the old man through the ancient ceremony. His uncle measures the leaves, smelling each one in turn, then closes them up in silk, and leaves them to steep in boiling water.

If Urson were still alive, Zuko would take tea with him every morning, just like he used to with his mother. He’d let his son feed the lizard-goslings grain from his palm, and help the boy memorize his lessons underneath flowering wisteria.

The cooling scent of spearmint soothes him. It always was Mai’s favorite, she said it dampened his passions enough for him to occasionally think rationally. The fire in his stomach flares, but not as hot as before.

The hot water dilutes the acid in his stomach, calms his flesh at war with itself.

“You’ve been different lately,” Iroh says. Zuko’s teeth clatter on the fine porcelain of his teacup. He knows he has been neglecting the management of the city, knows he deserves admonition, but still dreads receiving it from his uncle. “I haven’t seen you smile so much since- well, since you were younger.” Since Mai is what Iroh doesn’t say, but Zuko hears it nonetheless. “It’s like you’re alive again,” Iroh says, and Zuko flushes. 

“Uncle,” he says.

“You’re bright red, Nephew,” Iroh says, eyes twinkling in that sharp, interested way that always reminds Zuko of Azula.

“After Urson- after Mai, I didn’t think I’d ever want- and I don’t, I still love them, I can’t sleep without dreaming of them. It’s just…” his head throbs; his tongue loosens, he speaks. “The woman has bewitched me. I have never known anyone like her, so versed in suffering, so agonized by exile. She is so alien, she must have spirit blood in her, to move like she does over the world’s face, to have endured so much loss and to still be so strong. What I feel… It’s like I’ve been burned all over again,” he touches his scar, and his uncle flinches. “I’d rather the earth swallow me than I touch her, but what I dream, Uncle… I don’t know how to help myself.” Zuko expects his uncle to remind him of his duty, to speak of the city that is rising around him, to fill his head with all his obligations, but instead a smile splits Iroh’s wrinkled face, and his eyes shimmer with ill-concealed merriment. 

“The Water Tribe girl is very beautiful,” his uncle says. “And it would seem she is your equal. Her people love her as yours love you; she is a skilled bender, and she too has lost her home. What you are feeling is natural, Zuko.”

“I’ve been neglecting the city,” he protests, and his uncle sighs.

“Sometimes a skilled rider gives his mount its head, instead of relying on a goad. He still gets where he needs to go.” 

“You know how I feel about proverbs, Uncle.”

“My son,” Iroh says. “You have Ozai’s armies to the west, impassable to the east, the sea at your south, and Omashu at your north. You need allies, you need people who know how to be warriors. Her people are hard workers, are enemies of your enemies, are strong and brave and dangerous. It would be no terrible thing if they were to stay.”

“So you think-” Zuko swallows a sip of the burning hot spearmint, he steadies his voice. “You think they would be beneficial for the city?”

“No,” Iroh says. “I think that she is beneficial for you.” Zuko flushes, and pain swallows his mind momentarily. His head throbs.

“So I should ask her to stay? How? Her people are all eager for the north, the Earth Kingdom holds nothing for them.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of the right words, King Zuko,” Iroh says, with a sly smile.

_______________________

Just like a riptide snatches a child from the safety of the shallows out into the open water of the winter sea, so Katara’s eyes catch Zuko’s.

Just like a burning palm eats through a son’s soft skin, eats down to bone, sizzles fat and tears and gristle into smoke, so Katara burns in Zuko’s memory.

He takes her for long walks throughout his city. He shows her the boundaries, the city’s limits, the extent of his territory, the palace complex the citadel’s height where the temples to the ancestral spirits are laid. She walks with him to the wharf (she knows the names of every kind of ship; she talks trade with the fishermen and wins warm smiles when she discusses about shoaling grounds of bream and sea-spider and concheel), and she stands beside him as he leads her across the white walls being raised around Ursmai’s wide border. They wander through the clean-swept streets of the lower levels, where the working people dwell.

The spring brought dozens of new births, and everywhere he turns, he hears the sound of children crying in their fathers’ arms. Women who walked overland in his retinue, men who starved with him beside smoldering fires in harshness of the Serpent’s Pass, adolescents whose growth he feared would be stunted through privation, all beckon him to hold their offspring, his city’s future.

The children are fat, round, smiling, more often than not. Their eyes tend golden, but there is no absence of green among them. The children are swaddled in fortunate black, and they coo when his shadow passes over them.

“His name is Zukon,” he is told, for the fifth time that afternoon. Occasionally there is an Ira, or an Ursa, sometimes Piandon or Jeonga, but his name predominates among offspring of the exiles. 

He blesses the child, presses his lips to the boy’s forehead in recognition of the honor done to him by the baby’s parents.

Katara does not ask to hold the baby. She is an alien, a stranger, she has no business wanting to clutch the children of his city to her breast, but her gaze follows the child, drawn to him like iron filings to a lodestone. 

He knows the look of loss. 

When he offers her the infant, she takes the child with no hesitation. 

Her eyes are blue as melting glaciers. She presses her nose to the newborn’s head and breathes in the scent of new life. Her eyes shut, close out the world, her shoulders tense, even as she settles the baby’s weight more securely in her arms. When she opens her eyes again, he sees a tear trembling on the lower lid.

The baby coos.

“The spirits’ blessings on him,” Katara murmurs, and hands the child back to his mother, whom Zuko watched grow from a gangly-legged orphan to the Master of Theatrics for the west quarter.

“You’re kind, my lady,” the woman says. “May the spirits bless you for it.”

She bites her lip, digs her teeth into the soft pink flesh, and he offers her his hand, in a gesture that is just shy of polite.

“I’m sorry,” she says, when the mother and her baby are out of earshot.

“So am I, Katara,” he says. She looks at him. Her face is dark and lovely, her eyes are pools of icemelt in summer. He wants to crack her gelid visage, light the flame of desire in her blue gaze, he wants to make her say his name, and mean it when she says it. She wets her lips with her tongue, swiping its pink tip along her pink lips. Her teeth, he sees, have drawn blood.

He can almost taste it, ferrous, feral, Katara. 

He gnawed a hole in his cheek, when he was first recovering from the wound his father gave him. He bites his tongue to keep from saying words that cannot be unsaid. Her fingers wrap around his in a way that is just shy of polite.

He is more frequently absent from his council meetings in one month than he has been in the eight years since his city’s founding. He lets his interest in marginal tax revenue and domestic travel restrictions and economic projections founder, and he clears his afternoons to entertain his guest, as any good host would.

She sleeps late, attuned to the moon, else he’s half convinced he would free his mornings for her too.

She joins him every day at noon in the temple complex to offer sacrifices to Agni and the spirits of his ancestors. The temple rises around them as the days slip to weeks, white stone and gleaming gold and flashing silver overtaking a formerly empty courtyard. As the king of the city, when he is in attendance for the sacrifice, it is his knife that slits the shorn throats of the koala sheep, and his hands that draw out their entrails for expisticy.

Unlike his uncle, he has no natural gift for reading the future in the organs and slimy innards of the sacrificial animals, but he knows enough to run his hands over the lobes of their livers, searching for the flame-shaped blemish that promises- that promises-

He and Mai were granted permission to wed when Azulon sacrificed a flying python and read the future of the Fire Nation in the way the creature’s liver coiled round its heart and stomach. The Fire Sages had not wanted him to marry, because his body was marred by fire, the highest sacrilege possible for a Son of the Sun, but Azulon’s vision had been certain.

When Zuko’s head throbs in the long hours of the night, when he reads reports from the borderlands, when he attempts to calculate the revenue of the fisheries, when he searches for gold to buy another man-of-war, he wonders what exactly Azulon saw in the coiled entrails of the winged snake. If he is the Fire Nation’s future, a king slowly blinding himself through work, a cripple crippling himself through work, a father who could not even bury his son, what hope do his people have of any future at all?

Zuko’s arms are bloody to his elbows after the midday slaughter, and when he goes to cleanse himself ritually with ocean water and lye made from the ashes of the sacrificial fires, Katara goes with him. The sea is warm, like the ocean around Ember Island where he spent his summers as a child. After he scrubs off the filth of sacrifice and slaughtered animals, he floats on his back in the water, feeling the waves washing over his skin, creeping up into his ears, the corners of his eyes, his nose, and then retreating.

Katara, robed in blue silk and borrowed gold, summons the water to her, cloaks herself in liquid, parts the sea and shows him the hidden depths of the bay. Exploring in a bubble of air, they find a shipwreck, a warship from Sozin’s time. He surfaces, his mind charged with images of an entire civilization’s destruction, and he and Katara swim back to shore in silence.

So they stand in the ocean in the daylight, the salt waves slapping at his thighs, and he does not allow himself to brush a clinging strand of wet hair from her cheek.

“I want peace,” Katara says, dripping saltwater and reflecting sunlight. Her white bindings do nothing to conceal her body from his gaze, and he can see every jutting bone, every softening curve, every hair standing on end.

“What you want, I want,” he echoes, and she raises her eyes, glacier-cold and glacier-hard, to his.

Spirits, he wants to rip the white coverings from her body, he wants to take her and make her his, he wants to lose himself in her, wants to drown himself in the azure of her eyes. The curve of her shoulders turns into the swell of her breasts, like the way a wave rolls over itself. The flat of her stomach that is slowly filling out with good food, her hips are rounding now that he has helped her escape starvation.

When Mai was with Urson, she was utterly miserable, she could scarcely stand to be touched until the midpoint of her pregnancy, and then she became insatiable. If Katara were to grow round with his child-

Spirits, he can feel himself hardening, and she’s his guest. He’s not some lecherous fool to be drooling over a stranger’s half-clothed body, he can’t-

“Zuko,” she says. His name on her lips stirs blood in his heart.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “Headache.” And he turns away from her before he humiliates himself further.

In the evenings, he joins his people and hers in the common hall, which every day grows nearer to completion. The frescoes flower over the white walls, images of peace, of feasts, of peoples joined in unity. The Chief Aesthete asks Katara to sit for a portrait, and she agrees, so one is made of them clasping hands, a symbol of friendship, brotherhood, common cause. Water and fire are mingled above and beneath them, and the sun illuminates Katara, while he is bathed in the silver glow of the moon.

When she retires to her chambers, sleeplessness draws him before her picture. He traces the soft curves of her chin with his fingers, and he imagines the stone wall warming beneath his touch.

Does she know what she does to him? Does she know how he looks at her from beneath lowered lashes, how her words entrance him? Would she care if she did?

He startles when she scuffs her feet against the mosaiced flagstones of the dining hall. He rears backwards from their portrait, and turns to face her.

“Can’t sleep?” She asks him. Her voice is fluid, her tone liquid, her words water that soothes the burning fire in his stomach. Her hair is long and loose about her face, let down from the ceremonial braids she customarily wears. She is dressed for bed, wrapped in a kaftan of blue-dyed wool, and her eyes are wide and clear.

“Bad dreams,” he says. She touches his shoulder, and he looks at her brown hand against the black of his robes. “You?” He asks. His mouth is dry, he has to swallow before he can get the words out.

“Bad dreams,” she echoes. She does not pull her hand away. She flicks her eyes upwards at him, and his heart jolts when her gaze meets his. “I’ve found it difficult to be alone,” she says.

“You don’t have to be, Katara,” he says. She wets her lips, and looks up at him. She is close, so close he can feel the heat of her body radiating off her skin. He could draw her against his chest, bend his head, press his lips to hers. She does not pull backwards.

“Your city is a harbor from summer gales,” she says. “Watching your walls rise, seeing your citadel coming into being, has been good for my people, I think. It’s comforting to see that exile isn’t permanent.”

She is so close to him, so close he can smell the wine on her breath, and see the individual flecks of silver floating in her eyes.

“Katara-” he says. Her kaftan slips, and he can see the dark curve of her shoulder in the flickering candlelight.

“Zuko,” she says. His name is a half-whisper on her tongue, she says it like Mai used to, all breath and softness.

He reels backwards. Every nerve in his body sizzles as though struck by lightning. 

“Goodnight,” he says, and turns away from her.

The halls of his palace are silent, empty. It is Wind’s Day, the middle of the week, and weariness crouches over Ursmai like an alley-pather crouches over a fluttering sparrowkeet.

He is drawn to the tapestry of his ancestor. He illuminates her child’s face with fire held in his palm, and he sees Urson reflected in her eyes.

His son would have turned twelve this year. He would finally be old enough to wear his crown prince’s pin, to attend council meetings, to begin learning the advanced firebending forms, if he was a bender.

He died before Zuko had a chance to learn one way or another.

A sob trembles in his throat, and a headache flashes behind his eyes. He sinks to his knees before the tapestry, and allows the fire in his hand to falter. The flagstones are vicious on his joints, and he blinks back tears and the agony building behind his eye.

When his head aches, the faintest reflection of light drives pins into his skull. The moonlight in the corridor is enough to cripple him.

_________________________

He wakes to find himself in agony. He attempts to expel the pain with deep breaths, but when that fails, he rises and robes himself in gold and silver and polished leather. He wears supple boots with ivory spurs, and he. It’s the first day of autumn, which means a hunting day for his court.

Every sound is magnified a thousandfold, and echoes in his memory, painful as reflected candlelight is bright. 

His hobnailed boots clatter on the white flagstones of his palace, and send up sparks that swirl in his wake. He binds a golden cloak around his neck, and draws it over his shoulder. He takes the bow and quiver offered him by his uncle, and he bites his lips to force his attention from his pounding head.

He rests his weapons on his back, and the bow and the quiver ring together on his shoulder as he strides into his courtyard to face his people and the rising sun.

He’s the last to arrive. His people are already assembled, some on foot, some mounted, and Katara’s warriors are mingled with them. 

She’s clad in her warrior’s clothes, deep blue almost black, unadorned, well-worn. Her water flask is slung gracefully over her shoulder, and her hair is bound back from her eyes with a thin leather thong. She’s painted her face to look like a war-wolf, with greys and whites and blacks all intermingled to form a fearsome mask.

His ostentation feels suddenly ridiculous. His gems are cumbersome, his cloth-of-gold a burden. She looks like a killer, he looks like a king too soft to spill blood.

He mounts his ostrich-horse, and the bugle sounds, and the hunting party tears into the woods.

His ostrich-horse’s didactylic hooves send a jolt of agony lancing through his left eye every time they strike the ground. The sun rises, and its brightness obscures his vision to such an extent that he pays no heed to the prey animals flushed out by the beaters, or driven towards him by men with tight-stretched hunting nets. He tells himself that if only he remains mounted, he will have done enough. 

The otter-hounds howl when they catch sight of a platypus-bear’s trail, and Zuko, knowing that first blood is his right, forces his eyes open. The sunlight scars his sight, and he finds he cannot sea.

He hears the hounds baying, and at his right, Jeong-Jeong is urging him to shoot. At his left, he hears the pounding steps of Katara’s ostrich-horse. His bow clangs on his back, his arrows jostle in their quiver. He cannot shoot blind. He cannot see.

The sun’s rays paralyze him, even through the layer of clouds he knows is building in the east.

He shuts his eyes, and sicks backwards into his mount’s rollicking gate. Katara gives a war-whoop and drives forward; he hears the platypus bear roar up ahead, and then the ominous thud of the beast striking the earth. The riders stream around him, rushing towards the kill.

He slows his mount to a walk, and blinks, trying to clear the black spots of sun blindness from his vision. His head throbs; he scarcely knows if he is upright.

Everything is dark, except for flares of red fire that spurt across his vision. 

“Are you well, my king?” Jeong-Jeong asks, from a pace or two behind Zuko.

“Fine,” Zuko says, shortly.

“It was generous of you to allow the Chieftess to strike first blood,” Jeong-Jeong says, evenly.

“Leave me alone,” he says, tone absent civility. He hears the retreat of an ostrich-horse’s quick hoof falls, and he breathes.

He is not going blind. Not yet. He has five years, ten if he is careful. 

He opens his eyes, and sees vague, insubstantial shadows interspersed with flashes of color. He cannot tell tree from rock or person, he cannot tell shade from stone, he cannot see anything worth seeing. He shuts his eyes again, and resolves to slip away, somewhere deep into the mountains, where he can remain out the way of the general hunt until he is well enough to participate.

His mount is sure on the rocky ground, and ostrich-horses naturally want high vantage points. He gives the beast his head, and he sits back in his saddle, trying not to vomit from the roiling nausea of the creature’s movements.

As he moves, he breathes, expelling the pain as he first learned to do seventeen years ago.

As the morning stretches into afternoon, his pain lessons, and his nausea eases, and when he next opens his eyes, he sees that his ostrich-horse has taken him up into the cliffs. He can hear the bugles in the distance announcing another successful slaughter. The eastern sky is dark with approaching clouds, and he takes another moment to blink the cliffside into focus.

The sound of didactylic hooves crunching on stone alerts him to another’s presence. He draws his bow from his shoulder, but his trembling hand will not permit him to nock an arrow.

“Who’s there?” He cries out. A figure clad in dark colors with a painted face appears from behind an outcropping, and he relaxes somewhat.

“There’s wolves in these woods,” Katara says, her voice even. Thunder cracks in the distance, and the bugles sound again, and the otter-hounds bay below. 

“I can manage myself,” he says. He slings his bow back over his shoulder, and turns away from her, towards the overlook. The green trees blur into one single verdant river tumbling down the mountainsides.

If Urson were alive, he would be only four years shy of attaining majority. Zuko could look forward to the day he would be able to leave his city in his son’s hands. Then his headaches would be only annoyances, they would not endanger him or his people.

“What’s wrong with you?” Katara asks. Her mount scrambles easily up the cliff face, and presses amiably against his own.

“Headaches,” he says, shortly. She shifts in her saddle to look at him, and her eyes come to rest on his scar. “I’m going blind,” he says. “Three years ago my physician told me I had five years left, ten if I was careful not to overstrain myself.”

“I’m sorry,” Katara says. He digs his nails into his palms.

“I don’t want your pity.”

“It’s not pity,” she says. Her tone is gelid. “It’s fury. I would tear out your father’s throat with my teeth if I could. I’d make him pay for what he did to my father, my brother, my husband, my daughter, and to you.”

“Perhaps you will one day,” he says. She laughs, and the sound of her laughter is the sound of a chill wind rushing over a bare hillock. 

“Tui grant it.” Thunder cracks again, closer, and Katara glances upwards. “There’s a storm coming,” she says. “We should find shelter, unless you fancy being exposed to lightning on the mountainside.”

“The hills are riddled with caves,” he says. “We can find one to wait out the worst of the rain.”

“It’s your territory, King,” she says. “Lead the way.”

The first raindrop strikes his forehead, the second stirs up dust beneath his mount’s hooves. He urges the creature onwards at a brisk trot. Above the treeline, the rain falls in blinding sheets, so he dismounts and calls fire to his palm. 

Lightning rends the sky in two, and he sees a sloped cave entrance a hundred yards north. He hurries towards it, and he hears Katara hurrying behind him.

The sound of the rain falling on shale is the tambourine sound of the dozen pattering drums of a wedding march. Lightning lights nuptial torches in the heavens, and the wailing trees form a choral epithalamion.

He dismounts, and hobbles his horse in the entrance to the cave. Thunder clashes, and Katara dismounts, and shakes off the rain dripping from her body. Her blue hunting outfit is soaked through to black.

“There’s some wood back here,” he says. “I’ll get a fire going.”

“I’ll tend the horses." His hands tremble as he arranges the pyre. He stacks the wood up to his waist, leaves room for air to flow through it, and sets a spark to a thin bit of bark. Smoke curls up, then flame licks at the edges, and then the dry wood catches, and yellow light flickers off the rocks. He removes his cape, and sets it out to dry on the stone floor.

Katara turns to him. Her eyes are wide and blue, her pink lips slightly parted. With an effortless flick of her wrist, she gathers every molecule of water from her clothes and his, and sends them spinning out into the storm. A bolt of lightning strikes near enough for him to feel the ground shake. Thunder crackles high above.

“Water can heal,” she says, evenly.

“It’s a scar. It can’t be healed.”

“Maybe not,” she responds. “But in this vial I have water from the South Pole, water from home. I’ve saved it all these years, waiting for the right time to use it.”

“You would squander the last of your home on a stranger?” He asks, his voice scarcely above a whisper.

“You’re not a stranger to me,” she says. “Lie down before the fire, with your head in my lap, and I’ll try.”

He casts his golden crown aside, and lays his head on her knee.

“It may hurt,” she says. “But I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

She probes around his eye, and then she eases a tendril of water into his head. His spine arches at the invasion, but she holds him steady. She scrapes at the scar tissue within and without, he can feel her cutting through almost two decades worth of agony. He cries out, and she drives the water deeper, relieving the pressure on his eye.

She removes her hands, and when he sits up and blinks, he sees more colors than he has in years. The fire burns brighter, and he feels only the residual echoes of his headache.

Lightning strikes again, and he sees that her grey face paint has been washed away, and now streaks her hunting clothes. Her blue boiled leather moves with her when she stretches forward to touch his scar.

He swallows, but his mouth is dry. The air is pregnant with static, heavy as silt water. 

“Zuko,” she says, softly. Her voice is the sound of birdsong in springtime.

“Why did you follow me?” He asks.

“I did not want you to be alone,” she says. A dark strand of hair has come loose from its binding. He reaches out, and brushes it behind her ear. Her whole body shudders at his touch.

“I was married.”

“So was I.”

“I’m growing old. I’ve started going grey. I had a wife. I had a son.”

“I lost everyone,” she says. “I lost my home, my father, my brother, my child.”

“My home can be your home,” he says.

He cups her brown chin in his hand. He can feel her heartbeat fluttering in her neck. Her skin is clammy to his touch, but static makes her arm hairs stand on end. Thunder crackles high above them.

Her eyes are deep as glacial pools, but in their black depths frostfire burns. Her lips part and she angles her head up, and he presses his mouth against hers.

He does not mean to linger, but she opens her lips to admit his tongue, and at the same time wraps her arms around his shoulders and draws him to her. He tilts his head, brings his hand up to tangle in her tied-back hair, and slips his tongue inside her mouth. She gasps, and angles herself upwards to allow him access.

Her heartbeat stutters. Her nimble fingers skim the boiled leather of his hunting armour, and she tugs the knots and seizes his lower lip with her teeth. She bites him almost hard enough to draw blood, and arousal lances through his blood.

She pulls his armour off him, and in almost the same movement removes his linen tunic. He kicks off his hobnailed boots, and he takes her into his arms. She settles on his lap and runs her hands over his bare chest. He pulls her hair loose from its binding, and he buries his fingers in her long brown tresses. She moves her hips against his, and he has to bite his tongue to keep from gasping.

“Spirits, you’re stunning,” he murmurs, and she laughs in concert with the thunder.

“You haven’t seen me yet, King.” 

So, with shaking fingers, he unties the leather laces that keep her hunting clothes snug around her body, and she shrugs out of the layers.

Her body is a patchwork of scars. He mouths at her jugular, and she shivers into his touch.

Mai liked him to kiss her neck.

He trails his lips down an old burn that fans out from her shoulder to her stomach, and she moves impatiently on his lap, brushing against his swollen cock. 

“Are you always so hasty?” He asks, when she places his right hand on her breast and at the same time seizes his mouth with hers.

“I’m sick of waiting,” she says. “If you don’t fuck me, I think I might die.”

“All you had to do was ask,” he says, and she snorts.

“I asked every way I knew short of coming to you naked.”

“I don’t make a habit of this,” he says. He lowers her gently onto his drying cloak, and she gazes up at him with wide blue eyes, her pupils large and dark. The firelight flickers on her brown skin, turns it alternately tawny and golden. Her breasts slope upwards into the hard points of her nipples. He shucks off his woolen trousers, and hovers in between her spread legs. He takes her hand in his, and presses his lips to hers, and she reaches down to draw him into her.

Sparks sizzle behind his eyes. He cannot process her warmth wrapped around him, he kisses her more deeply, and rocks into her. Although shallow, the motion makes him gasp.

“Katara,” he says, softly. She sits up to meet him, the sudden shift in angles has him biting his lip to prevent from spilling inside her and ruining everything before it begins. 

“Perhaps we have a different definition of fucking in the south,” she says. She urges him to lie backwards, and she snaps her hips, hard, against him. He cannot contain his groan of pleasure.

She moves above him, and he tangles one hand in her thick brown hair, and he grasps her waist with the other.

“You feel so good,” he murmurs, and she brings her mouth to his, and rotates her hips in a fluid half circle that has him reciting his lineage to keep from spending prematurely.

“So do you, Zuko,” she says. He pulls her into another kiss, he tangles his tongue up with hers, he draws her as close to him as possible.

She settles into an easy rocking motion, and he brings his hand between her legs and rubs her steadily until she falls apart. When she is too boneless to move, lying limp and contented on his chest, he eases onto her back and thrusts into her, feeling her tight passage clench unevenly around him.

"Zuko," she moans, and he buries his face in her neck and kisses her until his pleasure overwhelms him.

Just like a young boy, swept out to sea by a riptide, swallows salt-water searching for air, so Zuko swallows Katara.

Just like the constant agony of a fresh burn on a boy’s face, so Zuko aches for Katara.

She lies with her head on his chest while the storm rages outside. He presses open-mouthed kisses to her sweaty skin.

Neither speaks.


End file.
